Robert Plant was talking on the telephone from his house, which looks out on his Shropshire property, an inspiring plot of English countryside near the Wales border.

“Right now I’m looking at a beautiful, verdant, windswept, rain-sodden British summer,” Plant said a few weeks ago, “which is probably why I go on tour so much, to be honest.”

When we caught up with Plant, he was prepping his summertime project, the Sensational Space Shifters, which just started its North American tour and will stop by Red Rocks on Wednesday. And in more ways than one, the new band is representative of Plant’s ever-shifting sense of time, place and aesthetics.

Plant is best-loved as the iconic Led Zeppelin vocalist, but his potent comeback as a folk-music steward — via his work with Alison Krauss and later his own Band of Joy — gave him a newfound musical life in the odd environs of Tennessee and Texas.

That new life also introduced him to his wife, folk hero Patty Griffin, who he met while she was backing him up in Band of Joy. And it’s Griffin’s love of her own hometown of Austin that started Plant’s discussion on his physical whereabouts.

“Patty’s based in Austin, so I’ve been hanging out in Austin quite a lot, and I’ve enjoyed it a lot,” Plant said. “I’ve met a lot of very charming and stimulating people there. But I have one major issue with it, and that’s the heat. I can’t do 97 degrees every day … It’s a good place to visit and be in the cooler months, but I’m stuck here on the island of the blessed. Patty’s coming here in early July, and I’ll be near Red Rocks at that time.”

The life of the Plant-Griffin party is a busy one, and sure enough it doesn’t overlap as often as Plant wishes it did. It doesn’t help that the Band of Joy is laying low; Griffin is back touring solo, focusing on her excellent new effort “American Kid.” And Plant is taking a break from the roots music that has so thoughtfully guided his comeback in favor of something, he says, that “sounds very interesting and unusual, really.

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat, but I keep dancing around to the music of my past, and I keep on swinging it around, and it beats going to work. And it’s certainly a lot better than it might be if I did the same thing all the time.”

You couldn’t accuse Plant of repeating himself much — as much as Zeppelin fans wish he would arrange a more traditional reunion. Instead Plant is geeking out over his new mash-ups of some old passions: Think of the Sensational Space Shifters as Delta blues as seen through trip-hop, psychedelic rock and traditional African music lenses.

Is that a lot to take in? Think of it as a recipe, the root of which is the blues: “A lot of the stuff I was really into when I was a kid was the Mississippi blues,” Plant said.

Add to that some trip-hop royalty: “There’s nothing wrong with the old twang so long as it’s accompanied by the guy from Massive Attack providing some psychedelic loops to go along with it,” said Plant of frequent Massive Attack and Portishead collaborator John Baggott, who is a part of the new band. “John commands some of Massive Attack’s great sounds, and he does the same sort of thing with us. It’s a cacophony of sounds. It’s very exciting.”

Add to that a skilled west African multi-instrumentalist: “Bringing Juldeh Camara from west Africa into the fray, when he isn’t familiar with anything else that I know about, it adds a whole different color to things. He can take a Mississippi Delta blues piece from Howlin’ Wolf and turn it upside down, and I can sing and turn on the voice, and it takes me from dancing with Mississippi music, as I did when I was 14 and 15 jumping around, into the pre-Led Zeppelin/early-Band of Joy stuff, which was coming from some kind of brother root. It’s good. It’s pretty trippy.”

One last ingredient should solidify Plant’s new (if kind of old) aesthetic: His hand-picked opener at Red Rocks is neo-psych rock band the Black Angels. This blues/trip-hop/African collision is ultimately another one of the artist’s experiments in psychedelic rock.

“I came back over here, and I knew I wanted to do something out of the British-African collision,” Plant said. “And this is powerful, and it takes no prisoners … It’s blues trip-out music. The Bristol element to it, the Massive Attack-like, huge drum loops that crash and bang are pretty heavy. But at the same time, they’re crashing and banging on blues scales.”

Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394, rbaca@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bruvs

ROBERT PLANT. The legendary Led Zeppelin vocalist brings his new band, the Sensational Space Shifters, to Red Rocks at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. Tickets, $60.75-$72.15, via ticketmaster.com.

Ricardo Baca is the editor of The Cannabist. After 12 years as The Denver Post's music critic and a couple more as the paper's entertainment editor, he was tapped to become The Post's first ever marijuana editor and create The Cannabist in late-2013. Baca also founded music blog Reverb and co-founded music festival The UMS.

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